I just wanted to share this with fellow SSD owners as they may or may not know it. 
I have a 512GB SSD and I run my work VM from it which is about 100GB in size. I usually backup my VM once a week to an external USB 3 drive for safety. So yesterday I started my usual backup and noticed that my backup was only transferring at about 40-50MB/s where it usually transferred at about 115MB/s.
So I started trying to figure out wtf was going on. I googled USB 3 Windows 8.1 slow and there are thousands of posts and threads about this. Seems that USB 3 has a lot of problems on Windows 8.1...mainly M$ is now providing the Intel xhci driver and this is giving people problems.
So I tried replacing them with the Windows 7 drivers as per this thread, but performance ended up being slower.
Then I read somewhere that the connections might be loose so I got under the table and re-plugged the USB 3 front panel connections...still no go.
So as a last resort, and I was always under the impression you should not do this, I installed perfect disk 13 and it provided me with some fragmentation information on my VM file. You can optimize individual files and I optimized my file. Lo and behold after the optimize my backup speeds went back to the happy 115MB/s and 200MB/s (for my external SSD drive).
So before you try all the other crazy stuff maybe this solution will work for you. I will from now optimize it at least once a month to keep my backups speedy.
I have a 512GB SSD and I run my work VM from it which is about 100GB in size. I usually backup my VM once a week to an external USB 3 drive for safety. So yesterday I started my usual backup and noticed that my backup was only transferring at about 40-50MB/s where it usually transferred at about 115MB/s.
So I started trying to figure out wtf was going on. I googled USB 3 Windows 8.1 slow and there are thousands of posts and threads about this. Seems that USB 3 has a lot of problems on Windows 8.1...mainly M$ is now providing the Intel xhci driver and this is giving people problems.
So I tried replacing them with the Windows 7 drivers as per this thread, but performance ended up being slower.
Then I read somewhere that the connections might be loose so I got under the table and re-plugged the USB 3 front panel connections...still no go.
So as a last resort, and I was always under the impression you should not do this, I installed perfect disk 13 and it provided me with some fragmentation information on my VM file. You can optimize individual files and I optimized my file. Lo and behold after the optimize my backup speeds went back to the happy 115MB/s and 200MB/s (for my external SSD drive).
So before you try all the other crazy stuff maybe this solution will work for you. I will from now optimize it at least once a month to keep my backups speedy.
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